


you appear as my soul

by theankletattoo



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Depression, Established Relationship, Growing Up, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Nostalgia, References to Depression, mostly sad idiots in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29702070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theankletattoo/pseuds/theankletattoo
Summary: He aches — not as much as Louis, he could never imagine all that he bears quietly — and as cruel as it sounds, it keeps reminding him of how fragile they are.
Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson
Comments: 17
Kudos: 48





	you appear as my soul

**Author's Note:**

> in my head this ‘verse is a sister verse to [Venus, planet of love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28669575)

“You know, H, I never thought I would have all of this,” Louis murmurs, lying on his back, arms spread out behind him, fingers loosely gripping Harry’s, mouth stretched into a rueful smile.

Harry hums, sliding closer, pressing his knee to Louis’ ribs, encouraging him to go on non verbally.

His lashes are long and thick and create soft shadows over the gold of his cheeks, wispy and flickering. One harsh twist and they will crumble and disappear. Harry wants their ash on his fingers.

“Have wha’?” he asks, voice oddly soft, fitting for the fragile moment born between their bodies, the places they are touching, the parts they are not, the words tucked into the corners of their mouths, songs under their tongues, a being full of love, love thrumming in bloodstream, love love love.

Louis burrows closer, as though he wants Harry’s knee to dig in and in until his bone has found home in _his_ bone. “Safety, comfort, a steady home — take your pick, babe.”

His heart aches in his chest, right beside his left lung, squeezed a little too painfully at the words of this lovely, lovely man he’s had the pleasure of kissing and touching and talking and loving. Harry wants to take himself apart and piece himself back in a way that will leave a space for Louis to hide in him.

“ _Why not?_ ” he wants to ask, the question sits on the tip of his candy pink tongue. He wedges it into his cheek and bites down, hissing at the pain. “Are you happy?”

The question is a tough one. It has no definite answer, maybe a quick yes, a yes about a memory that will fade in a while, or a no, baring his never ending pool of misery to Harry, but the pools dry up in the summer, there are yellow and brown leaves on the surface in autumn — it never is a constant.

Happiness; a concept Louis is familiarising himself with, trying to see the joy in the life he leads.

“I’m not sad,” Louis drawls out, cheekbones sharp, lips puckered into a thoughtful frown, fingers loosening from his grip.

Harry holds him by the wrist, circles the delicate bones with heavy, metal adorned fingers. “Is that enough, Lou?”

A seed of doubt sprouts in him, whether it truly is enough, if he is enough to keep Louis the way he is, a semi fugue state between misery and happiness.

He has no word to replace happiness — sadness, misery, melancholy, depression, _he is devastated, she’s wallowing in her room_ — but there is no word sweeter than happiness on an outsider’s tongue. _They look so happy._

Often he wonders, if they look happy to an outsider, someone out of the bubble they created for themselves.

For his own sanity, he thinks yes. They look happy.

_But are you happy?_

“For now? Yeah. In a week? God knows.” His face remains blasé.

On the surface of his heart appears a thin crack, a hairline fracture, because Harry’s seen every version of him and yet the pain never dims, he has watched Louis embody sunshine and bubbly warmth and he has trudged through days where his lover turned ice cold and wintry, ocean blue eyes empty and glazed and frozen, hands, wrists, feet, words all numb and hollow, settling into a shell of what he was.

He aches — not as much as Louis, he could never imagine all that he bears quietly — and as cruel as it sounds, it keeps reminding him of how fragile they are.

It is cruel, to be reminded of an existence by pinpricks of pain erupting somewhere deep inside, a place you can’t reach, an itch that cannot be scratched, leaving behind frustration and exhaustion filled marrow.

“Sometimes — sometimes you are too much and — and the others you are too little. I still don’t know how much I can dare take,” Harry confesses, stretching out on the floor beside Louis, the soft muscle of their upper arms brushing, crooks of elbows parallel to each other, Harry on his stomach, Louis on his back.

The carvings of his rings dig shapes into his cheeks.

“And I’m — I still don’t know how much I can give,” comes the garbled reply.

Louis’ voice is different when his throat is elongated and stretched out. The rasp is rougher, coarser, accent thickening and slurring syllables together.

Underwater, love and lover both underwater.

Harry adores it either way. He presses his face deeper down on his fingers, his rings have left their indents pressed into his features and it stings.

The sting is hidden in the roots of his teeth. A strange place to hide. But all of his spaces, the spaces he has found to hide are strange.

“You don’t have to give, baby,” Harry lies with a waxy smile.

The lie is a grainy orange and spreads across his tongue like sugar paper. He doesn’t bother swallowing it down.

Louis chuckles, a hollow sound that rings in the night. “You can’t lie for shit.”

“True, but you don’t have to give me anything,” he insists, lifting his face to peer at Louis’ profile, watch the inky blue light slide down the softened features.

“‘S not that, babe. I want to give, I do. Prideful arse I am, can’t bear the thought of taking and not giving back. Just wish I were in a state where I can do that without doubting myself,” he rambles, chest rising and falling, cheeks staining berry red.

Harry wants to trace the arch of his cheekbone where the rouge rests and watch his pink fingers go white as the light. It’s a strange urge, to strip colour — or culminate colour till it is nothing but white, a blinding white — or to wear all of it when blue is the only one he feels.

Except he is not the one feeling blue.

It’s a scary thing, how they remember, how they feel, one emotion bleeding into another, both of them so in tune with the other, they forget whose sadness it is in the first place.

“You’ll get better,” Harry murmurs, the reply late and for a long second Louis blinks at him, trying to remember their conversation.

“I _am_ better,” he bites out, anger taking over exertion on his face, the tip of his button nose burning.

“You are,” Harry easily agrees, leaning closer to rest his head in the crook of his arm, jaw digging into Louis’ armpit.

Glittery silence floats between them.

Harry breaks it. “I miss being sad.”

“You’re better though.”

“It was a strange comfort, Lou. Even if I felt nothing, I knew I would have that deeply ingrained misery. A weird thing to miss, I guess.”

Louis shifts, maneuvering Harry until his ear is resting on his chest, picking up the thump of his heart through the thin tee. “‘S weird, won’t lie but, I get it.”

“Do you?” his voice takes on a condescending edge, hackles raised.

Louis doesn’t take it personally. “Mhm, yeah. Missing that comfort of being sad? It’s the same as missing imagining your future. They are both strange nostalgias, love.”

“You can always imagine your future,” he points out, nuzzling into his chest, creating waves in the pools of his blood.

“Not the same though. When I was five I imagined buying a house with a fine lady and having two kids but now I don’t see a future where I am with a girl. It’s a matter of how well you’ve discovered yourself, you know. I miss it when I was unaware and dreamt of a future just _like_ that.”

“You said you’d never have this,” he recalls, lips puckered into a pout.

“Didn’t exactly have the calmest example of a married couple, love and I was referring to the teen me. I was a bit too pessimistic back then.”

“I can’t promise you’ll have it forever but I can promise it till the end of me,” Harry promises, linking their pinkies, dimples appearing on their cheeks.

Louis laughs, a light, airy one that feels an awful lot like the butterflies fluttering in his tummy and Harry wants to trap the laughter in his mouth and replace every sting with it.

“That’s a big promise.” His chest rumbles and the words soak into Harry’s temple.

Harry holds himself up on his sore elbows and blinks down at the man under him, the one he’s loved for three years, and smiles, bashful but confident, curls spilling into his eyes. “I’m a big boy,” he teases, wagging his brows, and sticking his tongue out.

Louis giggles, arms raising to wrap around his neck, fingers finding purchase in soft, apple scented curls. “You’re so ridiculous.”

The fondness makes his eyes misty, the gold in the green of his irises glaze over with clear tears, barely held back because he is so in love with this man under him, so much that he cannot breathe. His chest is tight and Harry bends to kiss him, misty eyed and pain filled teeth and love bitten lips.

“I love you,” Louis whispers, mouths inches apart, face bright.

“I love you,” he echoes, face not as illuminant but glowing nonetheless, mind wandering to another topic.

Harry is still thinking about how he could not bring himself to say the truth and demand for Louis in a way he is not ready to give. It makes him feel rotten inside — there is a rot in him and he is afraid of Louis finding it — as if he is doing something wrong, like stealing coins from his mother’s pockets, eating the cubes of chocolate his sister saved for herself, pushing boundaries that are not his to push.

“What are you thinking about?”

 _Isn’t that the question_ , he wants to counter, add a dry laugh to even out the heaviness.

“How I can’t resist wanting something in return,” he honestly states, feeling the rot spread its fingers.

If Harry were braver, he would show Louis the rot in him, the ugliest bits that reside in him and accept whatever might come out of it — but the thing is, he is not. He is a tad too selfish and wants to savour their time.

“That is not a bad thing,” he softly assures, nose pressed into cheek, lips moving below his jaw, words dragged along the cut of it.

“Is it not?”

“It’s not selfish of you for wanting your efforts reciprocated, H.”

But they are not trees, the seed sown is not obligated to reap, he has no right to wish for a share of the yield.

“There is only so much you can give without becoming empty,” Louis continues, hands creating shapes on his back, shadowed portraits of angels and demons and everything else, petal patterns, shapes that don’t exist, a melody for which there are no notes.

“Kind of funny how the night started out with me feeling for you and well, now we are feeling for me,” Harry mutters, arms quivering, the tips of his elbows going from sore to burning, vessels breathing fire as a protest.

He slumps down, Louis’ jaw knocks into his nose. “Ow!” he cries, rubbing at the spot, fingers delicate in their own right, not white like his.

They are still pink and Harry wants to take the pink and hide it from the light.

The light keeps streaming in, inky blue blanching out into a foggy silver. Harry can taste it on his tongue, the milky white light, the moony eyes he will make after that, orbiting around Louis because he is the sun.

Louis is the sun and he is burning being so close in his proximity but he thinks he would just die if he weren’t close.

A war rages in him.

“Thank you,” he quietly says, words carrying a vulnerability that is only comfortable in the late hours of twilight and the early hours of eclipsed dawns.

“For what?”

_For loving me when I tasted of war._

“For holding my weight,” he teases, not ready to elaborate.

“That’s because you’re always running hot and it is too — I dunno, cringe? Is it cringe if I ask you to love me because I’m cold?”

Harry laughs, Louis joins in and they are laughing, bodies still aligned against each other, shaking and shaking, trying to clutch their bellies.

Louis shoves him off and they keep rolling on the floor.

When Harry wipes the tears from his eyes, the light streaming does not bathe him in white.

“I never thought I would have this,” Louis gently says, rose tinted.

“Me neither,” Harry agrees and stands up, holding out a hand to him, ready to drag their selves to bed.

As they curl up in bed, two realisations strike him.

One, Louis has his own rot and they are both curing it in their own way. Together they are curing themselves.

Two, he no longer tastes like war.

**Author's Note:**

> [tweet](https://twitter.com/theankletattoo/status/1365042253777920003?s=19) [fic post](https://hadestyles.tumblr.com/post/644126285153615872/you-appear-as-my-soul-by-theankletattoo)


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